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Since I'm a Red Hat fan (which includes Fedora Core and CentOS), I'm aware of the complaints people have about "having to download multiple CDs" before they can start installing. In fact, the recently released CentOS 5 is 6 CDs (i386, or 7 CDs for x86_64). To counter those complaints, I thought I'd try a single CD install of the recently released CentOS 5 "Debian style" and then add everything in post-install. Join me if you will...

Most new Linux distributions nowadays come with a late-model kernel, virtualization support, and a 3D desktop. Mandriva's new Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, however, includes all those must-have features, plus VOIP phone support, Google Picasa and Google Earth, and -- would you believe it? -- support for the Nintendo Wii remote.

On Microsoft's Port 25 site, Hank Janssen has announced that Microsoft has released a plug-in Windows Media Player for Firefox. Well, that's the theory; in practice, DesktopLinux.com has been unable to download the actual file after trying to do so from both Linux and Windows systems.

While not marked in the official release notes, there have been some "under the hood" changes with the fglrx 8.36 driver. In this driver are two new files: esut.a and glesx.so. These are new X.Org modules for the fglrx driver and specifically involve TexturedVideo and OpenGL ES. The changes that stem from this should be very interesting and when the time comes for its implementation we will be sure to share all of the details.

Most people understand that an event watched by this many people for a month's time WILL generate interest and curiosity. The location of the event is secondary...no it's not even that it's...third-ary..? Well, you get what I mean. Now...if we could just put our politics aside for long enough to get this done, I am sure we can proceed beating the crap out of each other once we have secured ourselves a firm place in the market.

eLiberatica, the first national Romanian conference on free and open source software (FOSS), is scheduled for May 18-19 in the city of Braşov. The conference is the result of 18 months of planning by Lucian Savlac, a Romanian immigrant to Canada, assisted by FOSS licensing consultant Zak Greant. The goal is nothing less than unifying FOSS promotion throughout Romania and encouraging its adoption by business through grassroots organization. The goal, says Greant, "is to help build a broad, sustainable, effective free and open source movement in Romania that includes programmers, university students, and business people."

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the "Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler". He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads." The patchset introduces Scheduling Classes, "an extensible hierarchy of scheduler modules. These modules encapsulate scheduling policy details and are handled by the scheduler core without the core code assuming about them too much."

While there are many contenders for the title of simplest wiki or easiest to use, Pawfaliki beats them all for two reasons: the entire wiki consists of just one PHP file, and it can be configured by anyone with little or no experience with PHP. This makes Pawfaliki a perfect tool for users who want to set up a personal wiki with minimum fuss, or small workgroups looking for a quick and easy way to share knowledge and collaborate.

Nokia’s latest device, the N800 Internet Tablet, is unique, to say the least. It’s not a smartphone, yet it can send and receive e-mail messages; it’s not a phone, yet it can make phone calls; it’s not a portable multimedia player; yet it can playback audio/video files; and it’s not a notebook, yet it can browser the web.

Last week, two years since its last major release, the CentOS project released version 5 of its enterprise-focused Linux distribution. I downloaded it and put it to the test, and found that CentOS 5 has maintained its tradition of robustness and reliability while adding new features like virtualization.

Version 2.2.14 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a bug-fix release in the stable 2.2 series. The source code is available from http://ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon. GIMP 2.2.14 Released.

Just when I thought I had seen it all, I discover another issue that could, at some point down the line, spell trouble for those who are interested in keeping their Vista machines safe from malware. But for the time being, it is more of a potential threat than anything immediate.

I have seen my fair share of attempts at getting Linux into the mainstream, but the latest marketing ploy nearly raced right by me. What makes this so unique, so different is that this is an endeavor that is set to promote Linux as a concept, a collective mission even.

The first Digital Freedom Expo will open tomorrow at the University of the Western Cape with some of the biggest names in free culture heading up the bill, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig